Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Keep Up with Enterprise-level Tech?
E1ven asks: "I'm curious how the Slashdot gang chooses to keep up with the performance of high-level equipment for servers, routers, loadbalancing, and the like? For PC-type specs it's easy, every guy and his dog has a review website, and magazines stuff themselves in every window. However, the higher-end equipment is far more difficult to find trustworthy analysis of.
I'm curious how other people have solved this problem, and what resources they use to keep on top of the game?"
Depending on the environment you are in, you aren't making significant purchases that often. When you are, it's usually because you've outgrown what you have and can't simply N+1 it anymore. Either that, or it's tied to a brand new product offering. So you do the dance:
1) What are my competitors using?
2) Do any of my current vendors have a solution, and it is worth it?
3) Who is number 1 at the technology I'm interested in, and why?
4) Am I going to need contractors for initial implementation, or is the talent for this technology in house?
5) What's training going to be like?
Then you do a whole lot of research and select vendors(s). You let them come out and do a presentation if that's appropriate. Nine times out of ten, you'll end up going with the proven solution that a lot of people are already using. It's easy to make a business case for a known quantity.
Unfortunately, that's not how it usually works out. Other things color the decision like:
1) This friend of mine still works at this company and I'd like to throw them a bone.
2) For political reasons, we like company A.
3) The upper management prefer product C because of the pretty colors, and because so-and-so heard it was great at some cocktail party.
4) We are going to use solution D and that's official from upper management. There is no discussion. They read about it in CIO Monthly.
5) I have stock in company E.
You get the picture.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
The Register has a news section on enterprise computing. I wouldn't say that's all you'd ever need to read, but its a start.
http://www.theregister.com/enterprise/
Two of the large corporations I've worked at paid a bundle to have access to the Gartner Group reports. When we were doing tech evaluations, the people who had access to the reports (you pay for search ability) would then sort of summarize things for us, or in some cases, they'd pay a fee to Gartner so that the rest of us could legally read the report, or illegally just email the rest of us a PDF and tell us not to tell anyone.
But, basically, you have to find someone who 1) has the money to do the research, 2) has the experience to make quality comparisons, and 3) is willing to do it in an unbiased manner.
Sometimes large vendors (like IBM) have things like a "Customer Care Council." These are vendor-supported forums for the customers to exchange information, but there's fees involved, or NDA's that the Corporations have to sign.
I've also come across some companies that pay for research. They get evaluation or minimally licensed copies of the software, then try to run a comparison. The information I've seen come out of these is usually heavily compromised by someone with a bias. For example, one corporation I consulted with earlier this year paid $3 million for research on what to upgrade their POP email system to. The result? I'll give you a hint: the company writing the report also sold hardware that only ran one operating system, so they naturally supplied a report putting that operating system (and what would run on it) as the choice -- and supplied price quotes for the hardware using only their hardware.
So that company paid $3 million to switch to a more expensive email solution. Doh!
http://www.gartner.com/
http://www.metagroup.com/
http://www.idc.com/
http://www.forrester.com/
http://www.idg.com/
http://www.jupiterresearch.com/
http://www.yankeegroup.com/
http://www.aberdeen.com/
http://www.amrresearch.com/
And yes, they all cost money. If you're an enterprise and you want input on how to spend you tens-of-thousands to multi-million-dollar IT budget, you can shell out a few more dollars to get some research.